Sunday, September 30, 2012

Watched The Avengers again on Blu-ray the other night. In a movie full of good lines, a few stand
out for (of all things) their theological significance. Take the exchange between Black
Widow and Captain America after the Norse god Thor forcibly removes his
brother Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s custody, Iron Man gives chase, and Captain
America prepares to follow:

Black Widow: I’d sit this one out,
Cap.

Captain America: I don’t see how I
can.

Black Widow: These guys come from
legend, they’re basically gods.

Captain America: There’s only one
God, ma’am. And I’m pretty sure he
doesn’t dress like that.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

At the start
of chapter 4 of Aquinas
(the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this
book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic
metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.)
that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted. This is nowhere more true than where
Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.
Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already
misleading. For Aquinas does not
approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in
terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.” No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and
for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body,
but rather between soul and body. Even
that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul”
what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance
of the sort affirmed by Descartes.
Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over
the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the
“qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called
“intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it
is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms. At the same time, he does not think of
intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do. Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he
is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle
position between these options. But neither
is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers
under the label “property dualism.” And
so forth.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Lindenthal-Institut
in cooperation with the publisher Ontos Verlag announces an international
colloquium on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy,” to be held
in Cologne, Germany on December 7 - 8, 2013.
The invited speakers are E. J. Lowe, Uwe Meixner, David S. Oderberg,
Edmund Runggaldier, Erwin Tegtmeier, and Edward Feser. Details can be found here.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

I have, in
various places (e.g. here,
here,
here, here,
here,
and here),
defended capital punishment on grounds of retributive justice. And I’ve noted (following the late Ralph
McInerny) that what many people who object to capital punishment really seem to find off-putting is the idea of punishment itself (capital or
otherwise), smacking as it does of retribution.
A reader asks what the difference is between retributive justice and
revenge. It seems, he says, that there
is no difference. But if there isn’t, then
it is understandable why many people object to capital punishment, and even to
punishment itself.

I think the
reader is correct to suggest that the perception of a link between retributive
justice and revenge is the source of much opposition to capital punishment, and
of suspicion of the notion of punishment itself. The thinking seems to go something like this:

1. Revenge
is bad.

2. But
retribution is a kind of revenge.

3. So
retribution is bad.

4. But
punishment involves retribution.

5. So
punishment is bad.

The trouble
with this argument, some defenders of punishment might think, is with premise
(2). But while I would certainly want to
qualify premise (2), the main problem in my view is actually with premise
(1). “Revenge” (and related terms like
“vengeance” and “vindictiveness”) have come to have almost entirely negative
connotations. But that is an artifact of
modern sensibilities, and does not reflect traditional Christian morality. For there is a sense in which revenge is not bad, at least not
intrinsically. Indeed, there is a sense
in traditional Christian morality in which revenge is a virtue. What is bad are
certain things that are often, but only contingently, associated with revenge. Hence
those who reject punishment on the grounds just summarized are not wrong to see
a link between retribution and revenge.
Rather, they are wrong to assume that revenge is inherently bad.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

[I] was curious, given your work in
philosophy of mind, what you would say is the most plausible notion we have of
God's mental content… [T]he popular theories (functionalism, phenomenology,
holism, etc) all seem to violate the doctrine of divine simplicity… I have a
hard time conceiving of any conception of minds on which
the mind is not, in some sense of the word, modular, or complex. Minds have got to have thoughts at the very least on the most basic,
primitivist conceptions, and that seems to require that minds have parts.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

One of the
barriers to understanding Scholastic writers like Aquinas is their technical
terminology, which was once the common coin of Western thought but is alien to
most contemporary academic philosophers.
Sometimes the wording is unfamiliar even though the concepts are
not. For example, few contemporary
analytic philosophers speak of act and
potency, but you will find quite a few recent metaphysicians making a
distinction between categorical and
dispositional features of reality, which is at least similar to the former,
Scholastic distinction. Sometimes the
wording is familiar but the associated concept is significantly different. For example, contemporary philosophers
generally use “property” as synonymous with “attribute,” “feature,” or
“characteristic,” whereas Scholastics use it in a much more restricted sense,
to refer to what is “proper” to a thing insofar as it flows from the thing’s
essence (as the capacity for having a sense of humor flows from our being
rational animals and is thus one of our “properties,” but having red hair does
not and so is not a “property”). Other
terms too which are familiar to contemporary philosophers have shades of
meaning in Scholastic writers which differ significantly from those associated
with contemporary usage -- “intentionality,” “necessary,” “causation,”
“essential,” and “teleology” are examples I have discussed in various places.

And then
there are “objective” and “subjective,” which are sometimes used by Scholastic
writers to convey more or less the opposite
of what contemporary philosophers mean by these terms.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Over the
last week or so several news stories have appeared (e.g. here and
here)
suggesting that it is technologically possible to “hack” the brain and extract
from it PIN numbers, credit card data, and the like. This naturally raises the question whether
such a possibility vindicates materialism.
The short answer is that it does not.
I’ve commented on claims of this sort before (here and here)
but it is worth revisiting the issue in light of what I’ve said in recent posts
about how the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosopher understands the
relationship between thought and brain activity.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.